Five Takeaways From Tanium Converge 2020

Tanium Converge 2020 wrapped up last week with over 3,092 attendees participating in 42 deep dive breakout sessions and 19 technical labs on IT management, security and compliance. Participants logged more than 17,000 hours of engagement (5.6 hrs. per attendee) during our three-day user conference. That is awesome.

The keynotes included industry influencers like Retired General Keith Alexander, cybersecurity analyst Keren Elazari, and former monk Jay Shetty. 

Our fifth Converge was unlike any before. The fully-virtual event allowed us to invite a global audience to join us from their homes and their own time zones. The common bond? Learning more about how to manage and protect endpoint devices to ensure efficiencies, security and compliance.

And the good news is that the conference continues. If you didn’t have a chance to attend the sessions during Converge or want to watch again, the many sessions from Tanium Converge 2020 are available on-demand. 

Here are the top five takeaways from the event.

It’s time to reject “good enough” visibility

As Tanium Co-Founder Orion Hindawi highlighted in his opening keynote, IT leaders have been struggling with visibility gaps for years. While finance, customer service, human resources and other enterprise operations thrive with new and better data for driving insights and action, IT lags behind. 

The data and analytics that technology professionals have to work with is not only incomplete, it’s often months old and manually created. Inevitably, breaches, audit failures, software licensing penalties, and floundering transformation initiatives follow. The new era of distributed work has shone an uncompromising light on these challenges.

The good news is that the Tanium platform is not 85 percent good. Our platform can identify virtually any endpoint or device on your network. And we can do it at near real-time speeds and with comprehensive details and control. And we can automate tasks to find and fix any problems before they harm your business. That’s the Tanium promise.

Partnerships are the future for Tanium

As much as Tanium can do for your organization, we realize that we can do a lot more by teaming up across the industry. 

And team up we did. The efforts from our new partnership with Salesforce is destined to revolutionize the employee experience for IT service management. 

We also heard from Google about how Tanium is supporting organizations in adopting zero-trust security processes. Our combined technologies promise to seamlessly authenticate users and their devices wherever they are, removing the traffic bottlenecks and user friction of legacy virtual private networks (VPNs).

We were also joined by Howard Boville, senior vice president of Cloud Platform at IBM. He told us how the visibility and control of IT assets that Tanium delivers is vital to helping joint customers maximize their opportunities in this new hybrid and multi-cloud world. 

The focus at Tanium Converge 2020 was not just about cross-industry partnerships. Retired General Keith Alexander, former head of the U.S National Security Agency and Cyber Command, argued passionately for improved public-private cooperation to protect national security. It’s the only way that government can access the capacity and capabilities it needs to get ahead of tomorrow’s threats, he noted.

Tanium never stops innovating

While the show was big on vision, we also got down into some technical detail—the innovation on which Tanium is built. Chief Product Officer Pete Constantine explained how Tanium’s Endpoint Identity capability helps make zero trust a reality for organizations by integrating with partner products.

Constantine also talked about how Tanium Impact and Tanium Enforce will help organizations detect lateral movement attacks and manage policy and configuration, respectively. And there was more on Tanium as a Service: our new, cloud-native, zero-infrastructure version of the Tanium platform designed to drive down costs and dramatically improve the effectiveness of IT, security and compliance teams.

Looking ahead, we also offered a sneak peek of Tanium Risk, which will help customers identify, contextualize and remediate security and operational issues more effectively. 

Tanium customers are thriving 

We heard some inspiring stories from Tanium customers during the event. These are organizations that survived and thrived through the pandemic, putting their resilience to excellent use. They’ve responded to the crisis by taking a fresh look at their operations, priorities and technologies. They’ve taken decisive action to build agility, control and security into their distributed networks. 

The IT team at healthcare specialist VITAS, for example, is more productive than ever because of the endpoint visibility and control they’re experiencing with Tanium. It’s been able to prioritize security at the endpoint and roll out new digital transformation initiatives.

And the Maryland Department of Human Services shows that such benefits aren’t confined to the private sector. The organization was able to double down on endpoint security with Tanium for scanning, testing and patching. This helped it stay protected and compliant as cyber-threats escalated during the pandemic. And from this position of strength, it has been able to prepare for new projects to enhance threat detection through AI, improve data loss prevention, and other advances.

The edge is the future

Throughout the show, we heard how modern business increasingly begins at the edge—making endpoint management and security more important than ever. And the future will continue to move in this direction as 5G starts to mature, according to Qualcomm President, Cristiano Amon. On the final day of Converge, we heard his clear vision for this new world, one in which sectors as diverse as transportation, healthcare and manufacturing are transformed by 5G, AI and edge computing. 

The ubiquitous gigabit speeds of 5G will drive seamless connectivity in office environments and with distributed workers, Amon said. It will also help propel step-change improvements in telehealth, as well as make possible incredibly small and light wearable devices. In many industries, Amon predicted 5G will give birth to technology giants of the future to rival those that exist today.

It’s an exciting future, and one which Tanium will be at the center of—providing instant visibility and control at massive scale for anything containing a chip.

As all attendees heard at Tanium Converge 2020, now is the time not just to survive but to thrive in a new age of distributed work—with Tanium and the endpoint at the center of your plans.